Product Review - Yamaha ARIUS YDP-161 Digital Piano

A perfect balance: the classic sound and feel of a concert grand that the musician in you craves, fused with dynamic digital technology to carry your creativity even further. It makes the Yamaha Arius series a smart and elegant choice. When you bring an Arius into your home, you bring with it Yamaha's dedicated 100-year history of crafting grand pianos. The 88-key (full size) Arius features Advanced Wave Memory (AWM) Dynamic Stereo Sampling. The piano sound you hear with the Arius has been taken straight from a world-class Yamaha Full Concert Grand Piano, used in concert halls around the world, through a careful sampling process. Through AWM technology the Arius digital piano achieves a huge range of expression, from pianissimo to fortissimo, an area in which digital pianos have consistently fallen short. A Graded Hammer (GH) Keyboard is also featured on the Yamaha Arius digital piano. GH mimics the feel of acoustic pianos in which the lower keys have a heavier touch while the higher keys are more sensitive to lighter playing. These features are important for beginners and experienced players alike, since they provide a very realistic learning environment, and the capacity to interpret even the most minute emotions and expressions.Yamaha seemed to put a lot of thought into the pedals on this digital piano. Some digital pianos come with a separate pedal (not very expressive or versatile at all) that is connected to a jack on the piano unit. The Arius series goes all out, with damper, soft, and sostenuto pedals already installed as part of the cabinet of the instrument. This mimics the construction and, once again, the feel of an acoustic piano. Half-pedal control has been incorporated into this Arius series. The length that your notes are sustained depends on how far down you press the sustain pedal. The more pedal to the metal, the longer your notes will be held. One more thing about the pedal system is the included Damper Resonance, which is another sampling technology that uses comprehensive gradations to reproduce complex grand piano tones. Some of my favorite classical music pieces require expressive pedaling that just can't quite be captured away from a complete pedal system like the one featured by the Arius. With the Yamaha Arius' 128-note polyphony you never have to worry about lost notes in flowing arpeggio and legato passages. There are few things more frustrating than nailing a dense portion of music, but hearing your digital piano drop your earlier, sustained notes, creating an unnatural sound cut-off. Yamaha's digital technology allows 128 notes to be held at once.The Yamaha Arius line comes with several other very useful functions. There are 10 voices on this digital piano, so if you get bored of practicing with the Grand Piano sound, you can switch to the jazzy Electric Piano and Vibraphone, play around with the Harpsichord, or blast some Phantom of the Opera through your house with the huge sound of the Church Organ (a favorite activity of mine). The Arius comes with a built in metronome, a transpose feature (-6 through +6), Dual Voice, reverb, two headphone jacks (Yamaha even thought of your family's and roommates' sanity when they built this), MIDI In/Out, 845KB of internal memory (no external memory drive options), and 50 preset piano songs with a music book ("50 Greats for the Piano"). The song recorder is also a nice feature, allowing you to record and play back your own music on two tracks. As far as appearance, the Arius is as elegant as it is functional. It comes in tasteful Dark Rosewood and Black Walnut finishes. The keyboard is covered by a sliding key cover, and a music rest and headphone hanger are attached to the cabinet as well. The entire unit's dimensions are as follows (W x H x D): 53-7/16" x 32-1/16" x 16-5/8". It weighs 42kg (92 lbs. 10oz). The technology that Yamaha has engineered and displayed in the Arius Digital Piano series takes digital pianos where they have never been before. It strives to reach the level of expression that grand pianos allow. If you've ever played or heard an acoustic grand piano before, you know that feeling of joy that the rich, incomparable sound brings. I don't think a digital piano will ever be able to mimic it's acoustic counterpart to perfection. But for many people, buying and storing an expensive, full-sized piano is just not an option. If that is you, but you still need a quality piano to practice and play on, I would recommend the Yamaha Arius YDP-161 for its affordability, functionality, and elegance. You will be hard pressed to get this close to a having grand without actually buying one.